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After a Link-Based Penalty is Removed, Will Your Traffic Increase?

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Are you familiar with the feeling of dread that comes with seeing this message in Webmaster Tools?

Or perhaps, you haven't received a message, but have seen something like this in your analytics:

If you've received a traffic drop because of a link-based Google penalty, the results can be devastating. There are many articles written on what steps can be taken to recover, but not many on what to expect once you have done the work to get out of the penalty. Will your traffic increase suddenly? Will you see any increase at all? Will you see a decrease in traffic because you have disavowed links?

If you are looking for good information on understanding these penalties and how to do the work to remove them, here are some good articles:

The remainder of this article will talk about what outcome you can expect if you are dealing with one of the following scenarios:

1. Removal of a partial manual action penalty

2. Removal of a sitewide manual action penalty

3. Escaping the Penguin algorithm

1. Removal of a partial manual action penalty

To determine whether or not you have a partial action penalty, go to Webmaster Tools → Search Traffic → Manual Actions and you should see the following:

The message from the screenshot reads:

Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster's control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site's ranking as a whole.

Usually, when you receive a partial action warning you will get the following message in your Webmaster Tools:

We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

Occasionally, you will get a more cryptic message such as the following:

We've detected that some of the links pointing to your site are using techniques outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

We don't want to put any trust in links that are unnatural or artificial, and we recommend removing any unnatural links to your site. However, we do realize that some links may be outside of your control. As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action to reduce trust in the unnatural links. If you are able to remove any of the links, you can submit a reconsideration request, including the actions that you took.

If you have any questions, please visit our Webmaster Help Forum.

I have noticed that most sites that receive the "cryptic" message usually end up losing rankings. And, in many cases, the sites were affected by the next Penguin update. I would recommend that if you have a partial action, no matter what message you received, you need to take steps to remove the warning. There may be a few exceptions; if the manual spam action viewer tells you that a particular page of your site is affected, it is possible that only that page of your site has been demoted. An example would be if you were running a news site and had published a story that was beneficial to a particular business. If that business had built unnatural links to that page on your site in an effort to get that page to rank higher, this could cause a warning for just that one page. If this is the case, then you may not need to do anything as only that page is likely affected and not your whole site.

In my opinion, for the vast majority of sites that have a partial action message, it is vitally important for you to take the proper steps to get the penalty removed.

In order to remove these penalties, a very thorough backlink audit must be done. I have found that it is not enough to just address the worst of the links, or even the most recently obtained unnatural links. Once you have gone under the microscope of manual review, Google wants to see that you have made attempts to remove almost every single manipulative link that was made in the past.

Success: Manual spam action revoked! Now what?

You've done the cleanup, and achieved success! The joy of seeing a manual spam action revoked message never gets old for me. This message is usually the end result of many weeks (or often months) of hard work. I love the emails that I get from relieved site owners after they have seen this message. Invariably, one of the next questions asked is, "When will I see my rankings improve?" This question can make my heart drop because quite often, after a partial action warning is removed, not much changes. I am always careful to explain this to site owners when I first take them on as clients, but it seems that many of them, despite my warnings, are still expecting to see a return to top rankings once their penalty is lifted. Now, don't get me wrong; some sites do show improvement, as I will show you soon. But with a partial action the improvement is rarely drastic.

There are three types of traffic patterns that I tend to see once a partial action warning has been removed:

Outcome #1 (most common): No improvement

Unfortunately, for many sites that have a partial action revoked, here is what I usually see in their analytics data:

It is heartbreaking for a small business owner to go through months of work evaluating and removing backlinks that they had paid for a well-known SEO company to create, get their penalty revoked, and then see absolutely no improvement.

Why would there be no improvement after a partial manual action is revoked? For many sites, the only reason why they were ranking well before their penalty was because of the power of unnatural links. In most cases, these businesses have paid an SEO company to improve their rankings. Often, the SEO company has stated that their techniques all fall within the Google Quality Guidelines, and so the site owners are happy to see the great results and have no idea that a penalty could happen. (I wrote about this type of problem about 18 months ago. Many said that I was wrongly criticizing SEOs and that my article should have been targeted only at cheap overseas link builders, but I have seen many sites that were penalized after hiring well-known, reputable SEO companies that used low-quality methods to obtain links on a large scale.)

For the site whose analytics chart is shown above, the rankings were primarily gained through submissions to low-quality directories, bookmarks, and article syndication. Once the penalty was given, Google stopped counting the PageRank that was formerly received from these links. The resulting drop in link equity resulted in a decrease in rankings. But, the work that was done to remove the partial action warning, did not do anything to replace that lost link equity. When those links were removed (or disavowed) there were very few links left to support rankings. For many sites that have a partial action warning, the result, once the spam action is revoked is that nothing changes.

So, why would a site even go through the trouble to get the penalty removed? Are they doomed no matter what? No! It is certainly possible for a site to see improvement some time later. For example, if a site escapes Penguin (because the work that was done to get rid of the partial match action is the same work that needs to be done to escape Penguin), or if a site starts to gain natural links (either through good SEO efforts or naturally), then improvements can happen. Those improvements would not have happened if the work was not done to escape the manual action. I sometimes look at a partial match warning as a bit of a blessing. Most sites that get demoted by the Penguin algorithm have no way of knowing whether or not they have done the work necessary to be released from the jaws of Penguin. But, if you have done the work required to get rid of a partial match penalty, then you likely know that you have done enough to escape Penguin as well.

Although many sites see no immediate improvement once their partial match warning is lifted, there are some sites who do see an immediate improvement.

Outcome #2: Some improvement, but not a complete recovery

This can happen when the manual action is just affecting certain keywords. But, unfortunately, in my experience, there is no real way of knowing whether just certain keywords are being penalized or whether the penalty is on the whole site.

An example of a situation where a site would be penalized just for certain keywords would be if you had widespread publication of a widget in which you linked back to your site using keyword anchor text. If you have used the anchor text, "Widget provided by pretty green dresses," there is a possibility that Google has given you a keyword penalty for "pretty green dresses." Once the penalty is lifted, provided that your site has enough natural links and relevance to support rankings for "pretty green dresses," then you may see some improvement that happens within days of getting the penalty lifted.

Here is an example of a site that had been penalized for a particular set of keywords and saw a slight increase in rankings once their partial action was lifted:

The site had been penalized for some main keywords. Once the penalty was lifted, some of those keywords started to see a return to first-page rankings (but only to the bottom of the first page rather than their former #1 rankings, which is why the recovery is not more dramatic).

In some cases, if a site has been penalized for just certain keywords, recovery from a partial action can be close to 100% if the site has a really good base of natural links, but in my experience this does not happen often.

A site usually cannot escape from Penguin until Google refreshes the Penguin algorithm. For sites that see no improvement (or only a small improvement) when their manual penalty is lifted, it is very possible that there will be further improvement the next time that Penguin refreshes. For the two analytics charts shown above, these sites have not seen a Penguin refresh since their penalty was lifted. (The last refresh at the time of writing this article was October 5, 2013 and both of those sites had penalties lifted later on in October.) I suspect that once Google refreshes Penguin, these sites will see some improvement. See the section below on Penguin recovery for more information on what to expect when a Penguin hit site escapes the Penguin algorithm.

2. Removal of a sitewide manual action penalty

If you have a sitewide penalty, you will see something like this in your manual actions viewer in Webmaster Tools:

In this case, a yellow alert tells you that "This site may not perform as well in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines." Google then adds the following message with a bit more detail:

Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. These may be the result of buying links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

In most cases, a site with a sitewide manual action will not be ranking in Google for their brand terms, and quite often, even a search for their url will fail to show the site. This type of penalty is devastating. Usually this penalty comes as a result of very obvious manipulation of the search engine results. Every site that I have worked on that had a sitewide penalty had been involved in a variety of link schemes including purchasing links, creating large numbers of interlinked microsites or very widespread creation of spammy backlinks.

The steps that need to be taken to remove a sitewide penalty are exactly the same as you would take for a partial match penalty, but the results are usually more rewarding. Once a sitewide penalty is removed, there is almost always an increase in traffic, although often it is just for brand terms.

Here is a site that showed a significant improvement once their sitewide penalty was removed:

It looks impressive, doesn't it? Within a couple of days of getting their penalty removed, the site started to rank extremely well again for brand terms. Traffic increased dramatically almost overnight. However, did you notice that I didn't show you the whole picture? Unfortunately, I don't have a screenshot that shows the traffic prior to getting penalized. This site previously was getting several times this amount of traffic. When the sitewide penalty was lifted, the branded traffic increased, but the site did not regain most of their non-branded keyword rankings as those were primarily propped up on the power of links that Google is no longer counting.

While some sites only see a return for brand terms after a sitewide penalty is revoked, we have seen a number of sites that have had very dramatic improvements across the board. Here is a site that was hit severely with a sitewide penalty. Within 24 hours of receiving notification that their manual spam action was revoked, they began ranking well for brand terms. A few days later, the majority of their keyword rankings returned as well:

When a sitewide penalty is removed, in my experience, it usually takes 24-48 hours for brand terms to start ranking highly again. However, sometimes there can be a very painful tumultuous week where rankings come and go and may change depending on which data center you are seeing your Google results. We have one client right now for whom we successfully removed their sitewide penalty a few days ago. Within two days, we could see them ranking #1 for their URL, but brand terms were nowhere to be seen. However, the client could not see the #1 URL ranking. (And no, personalized search was not an issue.) The following day, the rankings were gone on our searches in the morning and then we could see the URL and brand terms raking again by the afternoon. Those rankings are still visible to us. But, the changes took a few extra days to be visible to our client who is in a different hemisphere and is likely seeing results from a different Google data center. If you have received notice that your sitewide penalty has been revoked, then please know that it can take a week (or possibly longer) for the Google results to fully show that your site is no longer being penalized.

3. Penguin recovery

There are not many published cases of Penguin recovery. Escaping Penguin is certainly possible—we have seen it! But, it is not easy. The work that needs to be done is very similar to what needs to be done to recover from a manual unnatural links penalty. Start with identifying the links that were made with the intentions of manipulating the search engine results. Then, disavow those links. It is debatable whether or not you need to remove links in order to escape Penguin or whether disavowing is enough. If you control the source of the links and can easily remove them, then definitely remove them. But, contacting site owners and keeping a record of your work will not likely make a difference for an algorithmic issue like Penguin, as no webspam team member is going to be checking your work. Some would argue that it is good to do so in case you ever do get manually reviewed, but my personal recommendation at this time is to remove unnatural links that you control, and then disavow the rest. Make sure you disavow them on the domain level.

To escape Penguin, you will need to wait until Google refreshes the Penguin algorithm. And, in some cases, you might even need to wait for two refreshes. In this webmaster central hangout, at the 38 minute mark, John Mueller explains that in order to completely recover from Penguin, the links in your disavow file have to all be recrawled and the algorithm has to refresh, and in some cases that whole process can take six to 12 months to be fully completed. Penguin does not refresh on a regular basis; it can sometimes be six months in between refreshes. The last announced refresh was October 4, 2013. (Some believe that there are occasionally unannounced refreshes, but I'm not sure if I agree.)

So, let's assume that you have done a thorough backlink audit, removed links where possible, disavowed the vast majority of your unnatural links, cleaned up any spammy on-site issues, and Penguin has refreshed. Now what? Will you see an increase in traffic?

The answer to this depends on what remains once you have done the cleanup.

If you have very few truly natural links, then you likely will not see much improvement once Penguin refreshes. Here is the analytics data from a site that was affected by the initial rollout of Penguin. The site owner did a thorough link cleanup and disavow, but unfortunately did not see any improvement when Penguin refreshed.

The reason for this is most likely that the site was only ranking previously because of the power of unnatural links. In order to see improvement, they are going to have to be able to attract some good links and in some niches that is no easy feat. Gone are the days where a small site can outrank the big brands simply because an SEO was able to build thousands of keyword anchored links. In order to rank well these days you truly need to have an exceptional site that can rank on its own merit and not only because of SEO tricks. A good SEO will work on ways to improve the entire user experience and promote the site properly so that it can gain natural links and not just focus on a "quantity" over "quality" type of linkbuilding campaign.

If you do have a site with a good base of links beneath the unnatural ones, then it is possible to see some improvement once Penguin refreshes. The Penguin algorithm is Google's way of saying, "We don't trust this site because they have a history of cheating to get good rankings in the past." If the Penguin algorithm is viewing your site unfavorably, then even your good links do not help you much. But, if you can clean up the signals that caused Penguin to dislike you, then, when Penguin refreshes, your good links regain their power. Here is a site that had a decent base of links underneath a large number of unnatural links. They were hit by Penguin on April 24, 2012. They eventually did a thorough cleanup, and on October 4, 2013, it appears that they escaped the algorithm:

In my experience, when a site recovers from Penguin, this type of pattern is usually what we see. It makes sense that the site would not bounce back to its original rankings as some of those rankings were propped up by links that are now recognized as unnatural. It looks like this site was able to attract some new links but those links had only a small effect until Penguin refreshed and recognized that the site had now reformed. Now, as this site gains new natural links, it should continue to improve.

Here is another site that worked extremely hard to clean things up, and was rewarded on the October 4, 2013 Penguin refresh. This site has an excellent base of natural links and continues to gain links on a regular basis. They made the mistake of buying links in the past and those purchased links along with some low quality directory and bookmark links caused the Penguin algorithm to put the site in a bad light. Doing a thorough cleanup of the unnatural links allowed the site to escape Penguin. And now, their new links that have accumulated since April of 2012 are able to really help the site.

Full Penguin recoveries like this are not common. You will read many articles of people telling you what you need to do to recover, but I believe that there are few SEOs out there who are consistently recovering Penguin-hit sites. In my experience, unless you have a good site that can attract links on its own, recovery from Penguin is going to be difficult.

As a side note, we have seen sites recover when Penguin refreshed two weeks after filing a disavow, so it doesn't always have to take as long as six months to a year to see improvement. But, if you have a good site with good links and you have done a thorough cleanup, but you are still seeing dismal rankings, unfortunately you may need to be patient and ride through a couple of Penguin refreshes before you can tell if things are going to improve. I really wish that Google would allow site owners have some sort of indication as to whether or not their site is currently being devalued by Penguin. I can understand that one of the reasons that they don't do this is because this would help spammers to determine what is and isn't effective. But, it is extremely frustrating for site owners whose livelihood depends on business coming from their website and don't know whether they need to do more clean up or not.

A few added thoughts

Many people believe that once a site has been penalized, it will always be penalized in Google's eyes. According to John Mueller of Google, this is not true. In this hangout, John says, "If you've had a manual action on your website and that's been revoked, then essentially there's no bad history attached to your site. It's not harder to rank anymore….It's not the case that there is any kind of a grudge that our algorithms would hold against a site that has had a manual action."

You may have noticed that I have not shown any examples where rankings dropped after a penalty was removed. Many people are concerned that filing a disavow file will cause your site to drop even lower in rankings. The truth is that any link that is worthy of being disavowed has likely already been discounted by Google. We have yet to see a site that had its ranking decrease after filing a disavow file. In theory, this is possible, if you are disavowing truly natural links. But, even when we have sites where we have had to disavow a large number of links from authoritative sites (because of things like wide-scale keyword-anchored guest posting or paid infographic placement), rankings did not decrease.

Hopefully this article has helped to explain what you can expect once your link-based penalty has been removed. It's rarely an easy process to recover from a manual or algorithmic devaluing, but it certainly can be done.

I should also note that the scenarios described above depict my experiences over the last couple of years of doing penalty removal work. It is certainly possible that other outcomes can happen. If you have seen something different, please do leave a comment!

124 Comments

Based on a fairly large sample size of cases I've seen over that past few years, it varies significantly as you have pointed out. I think it all comes down to 'do you deserve to rank?' once the weight of a manual action, or algorithmic issue have been fixed. When you pull away the rubbish, what is left?

Only last night I was talking to an old client (now good friend) whom had received one of the earliest link penalties handed out (pre Penguin). Luckily because he was one of the first, (if not the first) in his vertical to receive it, he's now doing really well, while the competition are still flailing around in no-where land. However the site took a while to 'come back', in terms of both traffic & rankings. In fact it's now up around +80% traffic compared to before the manual action was given. And more importantly conversions have more than doubled, illustrating that the spam links was just holding him down more than anything.

The after life

The strategy behind this campaign though was just to remove/disavow links and ask for a 2nd chance. At the start of the campaign we decided to do pretty much everything else as well;

New technically superior site

Huge content audit

Integrated content marketing campaign

New branding & quality guidelines

So pretty much the lot... and not just worry about links!

I've usually found that it usually only takes one refresh of Penguin to get things moving in the right direction again, if you haven't seen anything after that then I would strongly recommend exploring other options such as Panda issues, or over optimization. You wouldn't believe the number of SEO campaigns which come to us who have the worst type of over optimization in my opinion; keyword stuffing!

At WMG we have been meticulously recording every case we've worked on, and due to the high volume of removal projects we're working on we're seeing some very interesting data, which all being well I'll be able to share with everyone soon.

I personally think the key to seeing results after your Penguin/manual issue is to not just start planning it while you still have the problem, but to action things which will ensure that you deserve the right to rank and get the traffic you deserve.

Excellent points Martin. I think that you've summarized everything when you say it comes down to whether or not you really deserve to rank. If you were ranking well before and those rankings were based primarily on the power of unnatural links then it is not reasonable to expect a recovery.

It's something which some people find really hard to deal with isn't it? It must be really hard to be told that you basically don't offer any value to the internet...

Having said that, I'm sure that you and others reading this will have had some come back to you embracing this harsh/blunt truth with;

"OK, so tell me tell me what I need to do then, and we'll do it right this time. I'm listening..."

Those are the clients everyone should be wanting to work with post Google headache. If you're in the fortunate position to choose with whom you work with, those are the type of clients I enjoy working with. They've learn't the hard way and they're most focused on the long term rather than stupid meaningless KPIs and 'quick wins'.

One of the problems I face though is when, for example, a local plumbing supplies store was previously ranking nationally for some big keywords and now they're decimated by a penalty because those rankings were based on unnatural links. The business owner will say to me, "What do I need to do to beat out the large brands again?" And in many cases the answer is that they simply can't. In the past you could fool Google into thinking that you were better than the big brands by building enough links. But now, in order to make Google think you are better than the big brands you have to actually BE a better and more popular business than the big brands and that is something that you're not going to accomplish by SEO alone and in many cases can't be accomplished.

Great Article Marie!
And, A very good point you mentioned in your comment Martin. One should not ignore the fact that if your website has been hit by any one of the updates, be it Panda or Penguin or any other, it would not be possibly hit by any other update too. I have seen a few cases in which people only concentrate on just on IDENTIFIED penalty and ignore the fact that revoking this penalty might not get back the site it's lost ranking.

What I would suggest is working on revoking the site from the identified hit and side by side monitoring the site for effects from others hits too.

Considering all the penalty cases, be it update or manual it is recommended that webmasters should consider G Webmaster tool for extracting the backlink list.However, sometimes the revoke might take 6-7 re-considerations and the best thing of the reconsideration replies received from G is when they mention a few links that are still causing an issue.

How is it Good?

Well, theses linked when cross checked with the webmaster list might show you that the webmaster missed some links.

In that case-

> Check with the option of some paid backlink list providers like 'Ahrefs','Backlink Watch','Majestic-SEO', etc.. Extract a fresh list and compare with the Webmaster link. It gives results for sure.

> If you do not wish to invest, then you may just keep on searching linking pages through G search by searching your brand.

Also consider that you would need to optimize your anchor text to get better results after the revoke. You may consider 'Opensite Explorer' for the same.

The fact that remains constant in all revoke methods and penalties is that- You have to have patience!

It was funny to hear you say this, "I sometimes look at a partial match warning as a bit of a blessing."

I was recently cleaning up an extremely messy backlink profile with manual link removal outreach. It was A LOT of work. I knew the backlink profile was hideous, but there was no manual penalty. It was extremely baffling and I was sort of annoyed by that. I felt like there should be a manual penalty imposed. Then, literally within days of me finishing the link removal process, the partial manual penalty came. I was SO RELIEVED to get that message because now I knew that I would be able to have a clear answer as to whether or not the 4 weeks of link removal worked or not. I already documented every step of the way so I had little work left to do in submitting the reconsideration request.

The partial manual penalty came on a Friday. I submit the reconsideration request the following Monday. By the end of that week, on Friday, the manual action was revoked. That was 13 days ago today, and we're already seeing a small lift in traffic. This week is on track to be the best week of 2014, but still no where near the organic traffic levels this site was getting in 2012 and 2013.

Marie - in your opinion if an SEO agency worked with a business for 5 years and most likely caused the penalty by their link practices, should they be charging the client for the link removal? Ethically on the surface it seems they shouldn't. But it's also a TON of work and time and they might have originally build the links with best practices in mind such as using anchor text extensively when it wasn't a big problem, or guest posting.

$5 says you've never written a check for any type of SEO service. Put yourself on the other side of a table, would you pay someone extra to fix their mistake? It's pretty simple a SEO company either puts in the work to fix it, or the company writing the checks is going to hire someone else for clean up.

You're right - I haven't written a check for SEO services besides working with subcontractors. Thanks for the business owner perspective - business owners tend to take a harder line and see things more clearly since its their own money they're spending.

Mark, you nailed it. We got a call from a CPA firm who was seeing drops in their rankings over the course of several months. We had a meeting, determined the "SEO" company doing work for them hadn't even set up their own user in the Webmasters account for their site. Once we established our user Webmaster connection, we found the Manual Spam action notice. I quickly informed my client about what it was, what it meant to his website/business and what needs to be done. A) Pay us to clean it up, bring it up to speed and then move forward with SEO or B) Get in touch with the "SEO" company that's been doing the work for him the past 3 years and ask them to clean it for free. He did option B and the company apologized and has been cleaning his links for the past couple months. I have also been communicating with the client and once the spam notice is removed, they will be continuing with us.

To your point, Mark, the business owners need to stand their ground and demand the current SEO company to fix it and also for the SEO company to do the right thing and fix it. If they do not, then move on and if it's true neglect, then legal matters could be in store. - Patrick

Interesting question - Should the company that made the unnatural links remove them? I think that's a question that can't be answered with a simple yes or no.

I would expect that most SEO companies have contract wording that protects them from changes in the Google algorithms. Also, whether or not the work done should be removed depends on the risk level that was explained to the site owner. I think that a lot of business owners are shouting that they had no idea that what their SEO was doing was wrong...but then they had to know that getting spammy links on thousands of websites was cheating. On the other hand, some business owners blindly trusted SEO companies that did things that were considered white hat by many (such as guest posting) but are now getting penalized. I really feel for those business owners. (I wrote about that here: http://moz.com/ugc/are-seos-destroying-small-businesses-a-penguin-story)

In my experience, usually if an SEO company has made unnatural links, there are other links that were either made by another SEO company or by the site owner themselves. So who cleans up the mess?

But, I think the most important point I can make is that if I were a business owner cleaning up a link profile, I would not want the SEO company that made those links to do it for me. Are they really the best judge of what is unnatural? I mean, they thought they were good links to start with, right? And, as you mentioned...it is a LOT of work. Are you really going to get a thorough job done when a company is asked to do hundreds of hours of work for free?

I've worked with site owners who have used almost every well known agency out there. (Yeah guys...I know your past linking tactics....but don't worry...I'm not going to rat you out.) I have found that in most cases, when the site owner went back to the SEO company and asked them to undo the work it is either not done, or done at a snail's pace, or the SEO just removes *some* of the unnatural links and considers a lot of the unnatural ones to be good links.

What I do think would be helpful for business owners is if they could ask their SEO companies for a list of the links that they made on their behalf. This makes link auditing much simpler when we have a list like this. When I'm doing a manual audit and I'm trying to decide whether a link is a natural mention or a paid link it is very helpful to have this list.

Well any one can charge a better amount for disavow the spam or bad links, but most of the companies out there whose outsource, like in Asian countries they do there most of the services on free charge for client satisfactions, but it takes too much time to remove the bad links even Google webmaster tool which given no guaranteed that our generated links, which is bad or unnatural or even not make any sense outbound links which comes from other websites will be removed after in a week or 1 months, this makes no sense at all, we are making too much links for grabbing our top position in SERP, but why we have to remove the thousand of links which contain low pr.

Well its a good question Joe. You know SEO 5 years ago was all together different than what it is now. Most of the SEO agencies used to do Black hat SEO and it also worked at that time also. But everything has changed after Google started to launch there new updates like Panda, Penguin etc etc. So, I guess its not the fault of SEO agency keeping in mind that at that time of period it was the best practice to get your website high in ranking.

Good post, I think we need to see more of this type of thing. To show that even if you are hit with a site-wide penalty you are still able to come back it can just take time.

I agree with most of your cases as well, we have taken one some really interesting projects over the past 2 years which cover all the cases and even some other more crazy ones =)

One post I wrote recently is the business cost of Penalties from Google, it is kind of shocking that low quality SEO work can cost you staff and millions in revenue but it is happening more and more here is an example of some work we have been doing over the last 2 years to fix up these issues - http://prosperitymedia.com.au/google-penalty-recovery-strategies/

I guess this type of work will become more and more specialized over the coming years.

If you hit by Penguin Penalty, Than It is very Difficult to Recover (Not Impossible). Recovery Takes too much time and Your Brand Reputation will Damage totally.

I want to Give Suggestion to Google: Google should Give some amount of time to Webmasters for removing unnatural links instead of Direct Penalty.

The message which Sends by Google to Webmasters should be like this:

Dear Webmaster,

"Google Detect some unnatural links pointing at your site. It may cause manual penalty. If you want to protect your Website from penalty, you have 15 days to remove unnatural links from today's date. If Google still finds an unnatural links pointing at your site than You will have to suffer from penalty."

How's That?

Webmaster should get at least one chance to remove unnatural links because sometimes webmasters don't not know about these Spam links pointing at their site. (some of the webmasters are not frequently be in touch with their Webmaster account)

Google Should Understand that This is not the Crime, It is a mistake. Google Should Give at least one change to the webmaster.

It would be a fairer system, but could encourage spammers to push the boundaries knowing there's no risk as they have an opportunity to remove the links.

It's more important for Google to educate webmasters on their guidelines, encourage users to not try to game their algorithms and focus on providing the users with relevant content.. But we don't live in a perfect world!

Your "perfect world" comment reminds me of last night's #SEOpub,* which discussed the whole issue of 'fairness' around Google. In response to Ann Smarty saying that Google are spreading the FUD around anything remotely resembling influencing search engines, I made this point: "Makes sense in a perfect world but completely unrealistic. G are naïve if they think everyone will stop caring about SEO…"

Yes, in a perfect world everyone should be pretending that Google/SEO doesn't exist and just marketing their sites as if there was no way to influences search engines, but the reality is far, far different...

* I don't think there's a Storify, so that link will probably become obsolete in a week's time (when the next #SEOpub comes along). If anyone has a Storify link, please share!

I agree 100%. Maybe an alternative would be Google giving a warning for just the 1st link penalty and then anything after that comes without a warning. This way it would allow for those webmasters who really aren't aware of the unnatural links to save their rankings / traffic before being hit and at the same time not allow spammers to continue to abuse the system.

Yep, this sounds like a fair compromise especially with penalties being moreso common on what may have seemed an acceptable link building strategy only a couple of years ago. The guidelines are in public view and very clear from Googles point, but mistakes are made and should have the chance to be rectified.

But I'm not a Google's peasant:D
Negative seo is real but not common. If Your website is clean, You have a little chance to be harmed by that. If not... that's another story.
And there's a method to get You into penalty without making bad links. Just one is needed with 301... I'm testing it how to fight with that.

Marie, your blog post has come at a good time - thanks. Ever since my site suffered a Penguin algo penalty, I've tried to educate myself as much as possible to try and extricate myself from the grip of the dreaded black and white bird. I've learned a lot from reading your blog and contributions to the Moz community (and, um, stalking you on Twitter...!).

As a small business owner that relies on the income from my business, Penguin has taken a huge toll. After investing in a website audit, an entire website redevelopment, a campaign of link removal/disavow, all I can do now is wait for the next Penguin refresh. In the meantime, I am doing the things that I'm supposed to be doing - content, social media, pr, better product offering, customer research, etc etc etc.

It's incredibly hard to stay positive and continuing plowing on with things when you're up against it. Especially when you have reduced resources and capabilities to implement improvements.

I'm wondering if I need to reduce my staff's hours - for the third time. These are the realities that face that small businesses that have been affected.

Hopefully the next Penguin refresh brings good things. I fear if it isn't, I'll be forced to cease trading.

One thing that it has taught me though - you need to spread risk!! That is probably true of everything.

http://webmeup.com/. Through this tool you find bad or good links to your website easily. Not just this. I think if any one created account there will be so happy and get a lot of detailed analysis about his website.

That's simple math for most common unnatural links (partial match):
We had 1000 links and we've deleted 500 bad, so traffic could have at most the same value before partial match. In a few cases could be more but common is "no change" or "less".

Makes sense. :) I see a lot of people who don't learn their lesson after getting a penalty and go out and build a different kind of unnatural link. But yes, getting (hopefully attracting) new links is key!

I told my clients to go into content marketing which is way safer and attract a lot of entries from long tail keywords. But as You said, went out and build another unnatural... and get algorythmic penalty.

Fantastic post, Marie. I've helped a few clients with disavowing/removing links and submitting reconsideration requests and there's only been one case so far where we saw significant recovery almost straight away.

Your 'Penguin Recovery' section is extremely apt for me at the moment. Back in December I disavowed a client's links - he didn't have a manual action, but I suspected Penguin, as his previous SEO company had used a lot of exact match anchor text on low quality sites (they're a reputable UK agency by the way, so it's not just cheap overseas companies who are responsible for poor quality work)! Since the disavow 3-4 months ago, nothing major has happened. I suspected that I had to wait until the next Penguin update and I'm glad to see that you and Mueller confirm this. One thing I didn't do: remove the links as well - I only disavowed. So I might go back and try to remove as many as we can.

The truth is: the lower quality of website - the harder to contact to its webmaster. G knows that so disavow is good to do. Besides, that's complete waste of time writing emails to admins. Mostly i got "inbox full" or "user doesn't exist". Real answers? Up to 10 (I sent 450 emails). I did penalty removal with sending to webmasters just for my 5 clients. The rest went out without that...

Yeah... I think I've only been able to remove 10%, 20% tops, when it comes to asking webmasters to remove links. But I do wonder that - even on an algorithmic level and even if it's been disavowed - it might still be worth doing... Would be a shame if that's what's holding the site back and keeping it 'penalised'/'filtered' at an algorithmic level...

I wish there was a way that Google could make it clear to site owners that if they are affected by the Penguin algorithm they almost always need to see a Penguin refresh before they recover. I get so many emails from people who are at their wits' end because they have done a thorough cleanup months ago and nothing positive has happened.

Thanks for tackling this topic head on Marie. I've always wondered if there was a possible recovery from such a site debilitating action. However, do you know if at the time when this penalty occurs is there also an equivalent t drop in visibility from the other major search engines as well?

And if so, is there a similar recovery period as you have stated here?

No, if there was a big drop in Google because of an algorithmic change then you won't see a coincidental drop in Bing or other search engines. Actually, that's often a good measure of whether you've been affected by a Google algorithm change. If you see a big drop in Google but you're still seeing top rankings elsewhere then likely a Google algo change has affected you.

Great, thorough coverage, Marie - and yea, I can see this post being referenced frequently in Q&A responses :)

One additional thing I'm coming to believe from a number of my client recovery projects... It's beginning to seem like at least in some instances, manual penalties are being applied as a result of reaching a tipping point for the site's quality. It seems as if the algo is identifying more and more "questionable quality" up to the point where something takes it over the top and triggers a manual review and manual penalty.

The challenge in this situation is then as you described, but even worse. The announced penalty may be for unnatural links, but that may be just the tip of the iceberg as far as what the algo is unhappy about. So clean up all the links and submit the reinclusion request, but not do anything about the dupe content, thin pages, manipulative canonicalisation, crawl problems etc, and of course no traffic improvement.

And then, even if extra effort is invested to earn new quality links, still nothing improves because the rest of the quality problems still exist.

It's often very hard for a client to hear, after significant investment in link cleanup and then more investment in content improvements, that they have to invest even more money (often including developer costs) to actually correct the other quality issues with a site.

These are the few cases where it often seems best to recommend nuking and starting over, rather than trying to implement all the retroactive fixes on a site that was actually poor to begin with. Because a client has a hard time believing it was so poor if was bringing in business before. I feel for them, but I hate having them throw good money after bad. Tough call to make.

Of all of the penalized sites that I have seen, Doc's situation has me the most puzzled. Almost every site that I have seen that was penalized was blatantly participating in schemes to manipulate Google. Doc had a couple of guest posts that contained links that really were only published so that a link could be gained. But I don't think that warranted a site wide penalty that wiped out his rankings. (He's back now by the way after he nofollowed all of his links.) I think in this case, it's possible that Google targeted him as a well known SEO so that they could instil fear of unnatural linking into the hearts of every webmaster that reads about the case.

Just to clarify, not everyone sorting out penalties for their clients may have caused them. For example, I've adopted clients who have had penalties caused by others, not me. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I thought I'd mention that, based on what you said :-)

LOL. Did you see the flack I got when one of my Payday Loans penalty clients allowed me to go public with their difficult recovery? A lot of people thought I was the one who built all of the spammy links when really I am just doing the cleanup!

I couldn't agree with this sentence anymore: "For many sites, the only reason why they were ranking well before their penalty was because of the power of unnatural links."

I have done some clean-up work in these situations and more than a few times, traffic doesn't go back up at previous levels. I always discuss these points prior to working on a site as this happens frequently. Great article!

I think i personally am awaiting the Penguin refresh with baited breath, having cleaned my site and having the partial penalty revoked.

I was not sure and still not convinced that the refresh would do the job i suppose ill just have to wait and see, I am not link building any more just creating content and hope people link, but what would be good if after you have a penalty revoked that Google could run a refresh on your site there and then opposed to waiting 6 months for the global penguin refresh, I appreciate that many of these penalty's are self inflicted for participating in bad practices in the first place however some people are genuinely innocent, and just choose the wrong marketing/SEO company,

From past penguin updates we could be looking Late May hope its sooner

Is there any pathway to recovery if you haven't been issued with any manual penalty yet your sites rankings dropped dramatically? We have done all the clean up we can and disavowed all unnatural links and were waiting for a Penguin refresh to see if this had any effect since we have no other pathway open to us by Google? However, the Penguin refresh hasn't come yet and we are a small business and just can't keep waiting as the business is our livelihood. How do you know if Google are looking at your disavow files and taking action on them if no penalty has been issued and no refresh has been done?

Situations like this are certainly frustrating. One of the main problems when your site drops like this is that it often is unclear what the cause of the drop is. I've seen people madly disavowing links to avoid Penguin when the problem was actually Panda. Or, in some situations there could be technical problems that are causing a site to have troubles with Google. Having someone experienced in this type of thing do an audit on your site would probably be helpful.

If the problem does turn out to be Penguin, then there can be a few possible reasons for the site to not be improving even though you have filed a disavow. Some sites need to see two Penguin refreshes before recovering because it can take time for Google to recrawl all of the links that need to be disavowed. Also, if your site does not have many good links then even after disavowing you might not see a significant improvement.

As far as how you know whether your disavow has been processed, there really is no external evidence other than the message you get once you file your disavow that tells you how many domains and urls you disavowed.

It looks like you have to wait for a Panda refresh. Obviously if you are a small business and can't wait a year for a refresh, it's worth starting a second website, and building it from scratch to get new rankings and new leads.

I would say that every webmaster should read Google guidelines for building links, its clearly mentioned there that if you are creating any unnaturally links it will hurt your SEO campaign. So stop blaming Google for its great work for users benefits by providing perfect search results basis on there credibility.

I've searched and searched for information on Bing penalties. Do you have any useful information for my situation?

Details: I got penalized (I'm guessing) by bing on my site http://zavgo.com I suddenly didn't have my site indexed with bing, although I rank very well in google and even yahoo. I did a bit of research and I think it was due to having some "bad/low quality" links. I really want to make sure I don't have the same thing happen on google.My question is this - Would that be WISE to disavow those same links from google webmaster before/if they penalize me too, or at this point would it be better not to "wake a sleeping Giant".

Hi Josh...sorry I'm just seeing this now. There really isn't a lot that is published about Bing penalties. At this point I do believe that Bing is looking into ways to combat link spam, but a lot of link spam is still being effective in Bing.

In regards to disavowing from Google...if they're bad links then YES...disavow.

This is a fantastic post and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I'm helping a website recover from a partial penalty at the moment and I noticed a change in the message received from Google in WMT following a 2nd (unsuccessful) reconsideration request. You talk about these messages in the post.

At first the message was: "Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links..." which includes the instructions to audit/disavow etc and then it changed to the more "cryptic" message, which seems not nearly as severe "...Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control...".

I'm wondering if you think there's a reason for this (e.g. website on the road to redemption) or if it's simply a Google documentation/messaging update.

Thanks George. I think that no one knows for sure whether this type of message needs to be acted upon or not. The message is really cryptic because it implies that you don't need to do anything because Google is taking targeted action on the specific links and not your website on the whole, BUT they also tell you that you can clean up the problem and apply for reconsideration.

When I first started seeing these messages in July of 2012 I told people to ignore them and consider their website clean. But, what I found was that every one of these sites saw a slow decline in rankings over the following months. So, now I tell people that there is still more work to be done. I think that perhaps there is no manual action on the site other than the fact that Google is not counting those links but my gut says that those links may still be used in algorithmic calculations.

So, most likely you are doing the right things and yes, I think the site is probably getting healthier. But, I'd still do the work to get the warning completely lifted.

That's a tough one because it depends on what was causing the thin content penalty. For example, let's say you had doorway pages (like a landing page for every city you service that were all the same), and and that those pages were bringing in lots of traffic before the penalty happened. If you had to remove those pages then of course your traffic would drop.

But, otherwise, you shouldn't see any sort of lingering penalty once this action is revoked.

Another thing to consider though is that sites with thin content penalties are often the same type of sites that get into trouble with the Panda algorithm. If that's the case you may need to wait a few months for things to look up.

Most sites that receive an unnatural links penalty have a large number of unnatural links. But, at one time, those links were probably helping you significantly. So, if Google stops counting all of the unnatural links and those were the links that used to be supporting your rankings, then it's not reasonable to expect a return to good rankings.

Also, there is a good chance that those links were hurting you in the eyes of the Penguin algorithm. If that's the case, there's a chance that you can see some improvement the next time Penguin refreshes. But, this would only happen if there are good links there once you've cleaned up the bad.

Be careful using 301s. They'll pass all of the link signals including Penguin issues. There's more info here:

Also one thing . We had some site wide back links from our network portals which are similar to our this site. all are job sites. we also removed back link from them. and few sites are good sites. u suggest me to put site-wide back-links to those good sites too?

I answered this question for you on my comments section of my site, but I'll give it another go here for the benefit of those reading this.

*If* Penguin is affecting your site, which is really common with sites with manual link penalties, then even though you've cleaned up your links you won't see any difference until Google refreshes the Penguin algorithm. That could be today, a month from now, or a year from now. No one knows.

But, some sites still don't see improvements even after Penguin has refreshed. This is common if the site does not have the ability to attract links naturally.

It's hard to comment on the links from your own sites without spending time reviewing them. If you've got a large number of sites, then yes. If there is a small number of sites and the links makes sense to be there for users then you may be ok.

Many thanks for this very good post!. Have read (and reread) liked, tweeted and bookmarked!

At the start of this year, the main keywords for my home page (website design + town) got hit by a suspected Penguin-type penalty (overly-optimised anchor text with incoming links) – the site went from no 5 to unfindable for these keywords but the brand name and inner page keywords only dropped by a place or so. There were no manual webspam warnings.

I changed all old forum signatures, ezine articles and squidoo links to brand, changed almost all my “designed by” links on customers’ websites to brand and deleted a few links (the really tacky ones that I could control).

In May/June, my site “recovered” to page 2 number 2 for what that’s worth – my business has all but gone!!

After reading your post the first time, I am now trying to create high-quality blog articles in the hope of future natural backlinks and social shares. (Have also done a lot of onsite work). A few questions:

1 A few optimised anchor links remain – a grotty Canadian directory wants $100 to remove 5 optimised backlinks and a niche article directory has optimised links. There are still a few “designed by” links from my sites with optimised links. Will these links be keeping my site down – or will a few optimised anchor text links be helping?

2 Would it help to remove 5-600 brand forum signature links, a few low pr sites (eg loveblinks), 10-20 article links – or could the loss of these links hit my site further?

3 Should I remove the optimised anchor text “designed by” links to inner pages – or will this make those inner pages sink lower? (At the moment, the inner pages are all the business I get.)

Many thanks to anyone who can give me some guidance – a business I love has just been all but wiped away.

This is probably a good question to ask in the Moz Q&A as you can get several people's opinions. My first thought on what you wrote is that it is important to figure out exactly why the site is dropping. The last Penguin refresh was October of 2013. While I have seen sites take a slow decline starting on a date other than a Penguin refresh because of bad links, if you have been "hit by Penguin" it would happen on the date of a Penguin refresh. Similarly, if you were to see a recovery, it almost always happens with a Penguin refresh as well. My point is that there is a good chance that there is something else affecting your site. You might be slashing links for no reason. I'd be looking more at the possibility that Panda is affecting your site for some possible answers but there are many other possible reasons.

Many thanks Marie for the info - the footer info is extremely useful (have tweeted and Google+'ed that as well!).

I hadn't realised that Penguin only refreshed so infrequently nowadays - I thought I'd read that there were now lots of little refreshes which is why I had assumed Penguin. Looking back, I also had a second page "web design town" as well as my home page "web design town" - initially, when my home page stopped showing up for "web design town", my second page started showing for it at the bottom of page 1; I deleted the second page (and also cleaned up lots of other duplicate content etc on the site) and my home page came back on page 2 no 2 (pretty useless for traffic!)

Great information!!! I do have a question? Other than adding great content, blogs, and making sure there is no keyword stuffing, what other tips can you give to help me improve my clients site? He came to me with the Google penalty (8k backlinks) He had 3 websites and we are slowly condensing them into 1. The next step is to change url's totally but i want to do all i can before i take that route. #help

This post has the kind of really useful insights that can only be acquired from having fought in the trenches for a very long time.

It takes courage to speak out against some members of your own community. No doubt some of the people that gave you the thumbs down in your post below squirmed on being confronted with inconvenient truths.

There may have been the occasional novice SEO who innocently embarked on a path of large scale spammy link building without realising the risks.

The majority, in my view, including some of the biggest names in SEO in the UK (don't panic) and worldwide, were well aware they were flouting Google's (clearly explained) rules and could not therefore also have failed to be aware they were risking and maybe even jeopardising the very survival of their clients' businesses, some of which may have been trading for decades.

I cannot believe how many times on various posts I have read people saying that "it worked, so it was OK" as some kind of pathetic justification. These link building tactics were always against Google's rules. Just because you can get away with something does not mean it's right to do it.

Anybody that abuses the trust of their client in order to take their money whilst knowingly jeopardising their interests is fairly low down in the food chain, I reckon.

Problem has now been resolved (as of this morning) - the site is now back for business name (and variations) and you can also now search using quotes for text on each page.

Thank you to both Keri Morgret and to Marie Haynes for such speedy replies (and sorry to have wasted your time). I didn't know whether I had done the wrong thing with further changes and was worried in case the site didn't come back.

I agree with Keri that you should probably ask this question in the Q&A. I have a few thoughts though. First off, are you absolutely sure that you haven't noindexed pages or blocked them by robots.txt? Were these pages EVER indexed? If not, it may just need more time for that to happen. Changing title tags like this wouldn't cause a site to be deindexed so something else is going on. One final thought - check Webmaster Tools under Search Traffic --> Manual actions to see if there is a penalty there.

Rather than replying here, once you've started a question in Q&A, I can probably take a look there and give more input.

Many thanks for taking the trouble to reply - I've now changed the original comment to say solved rather than wasting other people's time.

Just for info - I believe it WAS the title tags (and h1) that caused this problem as the site had been indexed for a few weeks beforehand and I had done nothing else. Sorting out the title tags has now (hopefully) fixed the problem.

Glad to hear things are sorted! I have definitely seen title tag changes affect rankings dramatically but I really don't think it's possible for a page to be totally removed from the index because of a change in title tag. Regardless, glad things are back now. :)

Thanks Marie for this post and in general for the info you share on penalty removal. I've been struggling for 6 months to finally get a partial penalty removed this morning (after 5-6 reconsideration requests...). I has been a horrible time for me and I hope that I still have enough good links to see traffic recovery.

When I first read this post and in particular the paragraph where you wrote that getting a penalty is a kind of blessing, it gave me new hope that this work will be useful and successful.

I can't believe you do this all day. It is too depressing for me. Maybe it's easier when the links you remove or disavow are not ones that you painfully worked to acquire for years ...

Congrats on getting your penalty removed! It's a great feeling to finally have your hard work result in a "manual spam action revoked" message. I'm not sure why I enjoy this work so much. You're right...it is very hard on me when small business owners come to me devastated because of a penalty. And it's even harder when I see cases where I know that I'm not going to be able to make a difference. But, when I do have really successful cases it is really great to know that I made a difference.

If you are always building up your links with quality sites then there is no need to panic for any updates. And as mentioned by Adeel by using web me up tool you could easily differentiate the spammy and infectious links to the your website and by having web master you easily disavow them.

I read it with baited breath, as we got penalised in September 2012 and have only just had our penalty revoked 21st Feb 2014 . We are at 8% of our previous natural search traffic and haven't seen any improvement at all since the penalty was lifted. It took an absolute age for us to clean up our backlink profile. We've gone from 100k links to around 1500 accross 500 domains. Our Ahrefs backlink graph looks great :)

Anyway - I was wondering whether you had any tips to improve our chances of recovery.

Congrats on getting the penalty lifted! If you've just got it lifted then there is a good chance that you will have to wait for a Penguin refresh in order to see improvement. Hopefully that will happen soon as we have not had one since October. The links that were targeted as needing to be removed to get your manual penalty lifted are often the same links that Penguin targets.

The other advice that I can give is to brainstorm on ways to get natural links. I mean truly naturally earned links...not self made ones. IMO a link that people actually click on is worth many many more self made links and really can help in rankings.

How many links can be build without any spammy issue being faced. Do it will be recognized by Google if i post more than 50 links per day. I learned lots of information from this site (SEO tips and tricks). Want to know more on building links.

I think you're going about SEO in the wrong way. Years ago the mindset used to be "every link counts" and "get as many as you can!" But now, a link that you make on your own is almost always an unnatural one. If you're able to build 50 links in a day I can guarantee you that you're heading for a penalty.

Great article and details about all that can happen with a notice from Google, Marie. The good, the bad and the ugly. SEO's should be responsible and ethical in cleaning up any mess they create, whether they knew about it or not. It's scary to see some of those graphs you present and the huge dip in traffic. It shines a light on that partial and manual actions can affect any website large and small. Thanks for sharing!! - Patrick

All great to know. Unfortunately, I've tried 3 times to get a penalty lifted, have removed more than 2,000 of the 5,000 links I can find that point to my site, disavowed most of the rest, and STILL can't get the penalty removed. It's too bad that G is forcing me to start a new site - is that really what they want? Is that really best for users?

Sure, it's their site, they can do what they want. But if they're going to talk the talk about doing what's best for users, then they should at least give me a chance. A "good" site is certainly a relative term, but I existed very successfully with many happy users for years, and now I'm in a black hole because of some links? Please...

I thought I had replied to this but it looks like my comment disappeared. Google says that any site that is penalized can get their penalty lifted. (I may be dealing with one of the exceptions to that statement with a difficult payday loans site, but in all honesty that is the only site I have seen so far that may not get their penalty lifted. And in their case, Google is taking issue with the fact that they have a number of payday loans sites and not because we can't clean up the links.)

The actual number of links that you have removed is not important. What matters is that you have identified the right links as needing removal. If you're still failing there is a good chance that there are links that you feel are natural, but Google disagrees. Sometimes it's helpful to have someone else take a good look at your link profile.

I have seen some sites that might be better to start over though. But in most cases, I think that doing the work to remove the penalty is better. But then perhaps I am biased because that is what I do.

Thank you for the detailed write-up. I'm submitting a reconsideration request this week on a partial-match action we received months ago. I work inhouse as the only SEO person at my day job, and I've been doing lots of link removal and cleaning old content on our primary site. This gives me some insight into what I have to look forward to (building quality links and seeing, hopefully, a slow but steady recovery). I'll be watching analytics and our rankings more closely in the coming weeks!

Thanks for providing detailed information on this "all important" topic, Marie. I personally have noticed that during some of the major updates, clients lose ranks for certain key terms. I believe you covered that. It may not be unnatural links, but it can be other factors which caused them to plummet. I have one client who may in deed have dropped due to "unnatural content," for lack of a better term. Time will tell if he can recover. He is still ranking for some great call to action terms, which result in sales. Yes, this is a dreaded mlm business. Thanks again.

I don't think traffic increases straight away, well not from my perspective. Unfortunately by-product of the reconsiderations is that they do take a lot of strength away from the site as the links are removed from the back link profile. Once the links are removed the keywords which were once ranking well due to those links do not rank well in SERPs... if keywords don't rank well, it hardly brings in any click throughs.

I've had success in removing three manual penalties (two partial and one sitewide) from my client's websites and don't see great results. To comprehend traffic, a lot of work is underway like content audit, re-jigging site's architecture, optimising Internal links and remove most of the money/commercial anchors etc. I just hope these audits/changes bring some positive news in terms of traffic. Bottomline - Traffic does not increases straightaway as rankings takes ages to recover from the penalty.

I really don't like the way Google handles this it always feels like the little guys miss out. Small businesses try to keep up with the bigger businesses who can get away with this end up getting a penalty due to not completely understanding and loosing vast amount of cash which is essential. Google needs to find a better way to handle it as its not a perfect system at the moment. Lets be honest Good content alone is not going to help you get to the top of a niche for a small business alone.

One of the issues you mention concerning if a site will regain lost traffic after a penalty is if that site deserves to rank in the first place. As you mentioned it is often the case that sites that were once ranking were only doing so because of a manipulated backlink profile.

When this is the case is it even worth it to remove the links and go through the appeals process or is it better to just start from scratch?

I think every site is different. If I have a site that I know has almost no natural backlinks AND if that site is not heavily invested into their domain name then yes, I usually do recommend starting over. But, in many cases, the url is one that is advertised and built into stationary, etc. and starting over is not an option.

A great topic for discussion Marie. Depending on the type of activity conducted, it is possible to recover, although businesses have no time to wait for a "full recovery". I agree with James. This type of work will certainly become more of a specialist area in the future.